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"Hint: if people stick to your old interface rather than to migrate to the new and shiny one then they probably have their reasons. Forcing them is not going to

"Hint: if people stick to your old interface rather than to migrate to the new and shiny one then they probably have their reasons. Forcing them is not going to make them happy." This leads to a dangerous line of thinking. There will always be a group of users who are resistant to change, and during a time of change they will be most vocal. If you listen to them you'll stagnate -- which is almost always the kiss-of-death for a company like Twitter. To be innovative you have to take risks and that includes the risk of angering certain people.

0x12 15y ago
Slower+buggy is not an improvement. I can't count the number of times that the new interface has reported 'twitter is over capacity', 'you have already tweeted that' (when it wasn't true) and a whole pile of other errors, if it worked at all. Page load times of several minutes on a 10 Mbit connection on a very fast machine are ridiculous. Of course you have to 'take risks to innovate'. But rolling out buggy and slow software is not innovation, especially not when it breaks web conventions (take a look at the new urls).
- TobbenTM 15y ago
  Sometimes you have to take one step back to take two steps forward.
- mnutt 15y ago
  Those two things sound like backend capacity issues, rather than frontend. The frontend as I understand it is almost all static HTML/JS. So they may be having capacity issues, but that would be true whether they stayed on the old twitter or moved to the new twitter.
  - corin_ 15y ago
    I'm not sure what the cause is exactly, but back when they let you chose between new and old, I found that it was always slower and less reliable on the new version of the site. And it hasn't got any better since they killed off the old version.
- eavc 15y ago
  I expected the first comment to be the old Henry Ford quote about a faster horse. Therefore, "Slower+buggy is not an improvement," took a minute to parse.
n3m6 15y ago
Totally agreed. One of my previous managers told me about that time they had to force GSM over CDMA. While the handsets were not all that different, the people with the old CDMA plans just outright refused to change over for months. In this particular case, the end-user would experience absolutely no difference in service capacity, yet they rigidly maintained the position. They just pulled the plug in the end. He suggested to me that in service switch-overs, always expect at least 3% of the population to hang on however ridiculous that particular position was.
true_religion 15y ago
Here's what I think isn't being said: If you take risks, the risk isn't just that you'll piss people off... its that you'll create something that is worse or no better than what you already have.

0x12 15y ago

Slower+buggy is not an improvement. I can't count the number of times that the new interface has reported 'twitter is over capacity', 'you have already tweeted that' (when it wasn't true) and a whole pile of other errors, if it worked at all. Page load times of several minutes on a 10 Mbit connection on a very fast machine are ridiculous. Of course you have to 'take risks to innovate'. But rolling out buggy and slow software is not innovation, especially not when it breaks web conventions (take a look at the new urls).

TobbenTM 15y ago
Sometimes you have to take one step back to take two steps forward.
mnutt 15y ago
Those two things sound like backend capacity issues, rather than frontend. The frontend as I understand it is almost all static HTML/JS. So they may be having capacity issues, but that would be true whether they stayed on the old twitter or moved to the new twitter.
- corin_ 15y ago
  I'm not sure what the cause is exactly, but back when they let you chose between new and old, I found that it was always slower and less reliable on the new version of the site. And it hasn't got any better since they killed off the old version.
eavc 15y ago
I expected the first comment to be the old Henry Ford quote about a faster horse. Therefore, "Slower+buggy is not an improvement," took a minute to parse.

n3m6 15y ago

Totally agreed. One of my previous managers told me about that time they had to force GSM over CDMA. While the handsets were not all that different, the people with the old CDMA plans just outright refused to change over for months. In this particular case, the end-user would experience absolutely no difference in service capacity, yet they rigidly maintained the position. They just pulled the plug in the end. He suggested to me that in service switch-overs, always expect at least 3% of the population to hang on however ridiculous that particular position was.

true_religion 15y ago

Here's what I think isn't being said: If you take risks, the risk isn't just that you'll piss people off... its that you'll create something that is worse or no better than what you already have.